I wonder if unity can work on my recent laptop. It has a recent nvidia and like most of these, it has the optimus "feature" which for now requires the hackish bumblebee.
It has been years since I had to go in the xorg.conf file, that was the main reason I switched from debian to ubuntu. That is the only feature I wish of any Ubuntu release. Can someone tell me if it has now been implemented ? From the release notes, they don't seem to mention it.
In general, I stay away (and recommend others do the same) from graphic subsystems that require extensive hacking to properly work under Linux. Buying computers with them rewards manufacturers who do half-assed work - they pocketed your money after all.
It's not like notebooks equipped with Intel graphics are more expensive or hard to find. Or that it would be an insane amount of work to provide functional (even if not fully-functional) Linux drivers for their product lines.
I just bought a 570GTX explicitly because Nvidia has always been better on Linux. I'm not familiar with this "feature". What does it entail, and how does it affect linux?
It is a mobile feature : there are two GPUs in the laptop. One is a small one, poor performances, low consumption and the other one is a full-fledged GPU.
When the usage of the small one is two high, the big one is switched on and used. By default, it is switched off and nvidia does not provide a way to switch it on on linux and stated they would not support it under linux.
I was under the impression that nvidia was the most linux-friendly GPU manufacturer and bought one because of that. I should have looked more into details but I was in a kind of hurry.
It was certainly the case that NVidia was the best for Linux until recently. But Intel has been working hard on their open source drivers and ATI has been catching up fast, and recently NVidia threw up their hands and said they had no plans to support Optimus under Linux.
Nope. This is Optimus: http://www.nvidia.com/object/optimus_technology.html. Nvidia have said they have no plans to support it under Linux officially which really sucks. I ended up returning a laptop because of it.
IIRC, there's an option to compile optimus support into newer linux kernels. I'm just using a intel HD3000 card so i've not tried it myself. unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have the friendliest policy towards custom kernel compilation, so you might have to "break the rules" or look elsewhere.
I'm running the Live CD in a VMWare Fusion VM, and it just goes to Unity 2D, so I'm guessing that a lot more hardware will see Unity in one form or other with this release.
Tried it on Nvidia 6200, initially all looked well. But something died with the desktop. Also compiz was constantly stealing about 8% of a 2GHZ cpu. So I reverted to 2D. Which was pretty similar - albeit for a few of the transitions. It was missing drag to top - to full screen, but you can double click the window bar instead.
What I was trying to say with the above post. Was you get a little extra gloss with Unity3D, but it's not over the top. And the 2D fallback isn't miles away.
I have noticed that 2D does look uglier in places - like modal popups - that are not at all in keep with the rest of the interface. Which reminds me of the kde shutdown window - which is also fugly.
Bumblebee was a life-saver when I got my Lenovo T520 and first learned about Optimus, but note that link is out of date now. He's forked off that to start again with "Ironhide", while there's another fork that's aiming to maintain bumblebee but fix bugs, etc. Details here: http://www.martin-juhl.dk/2011/08/ironhide-reporting-for-dut...
(If you haven't looked into it, I thought bumblebee was a great hack! As I understand it, it uses the nvidia card for rendering whatever apps you tell it too in a separate X instance -- using the "optirun" command, it doesn't happen automatically automatically -- then uses virtualGL to display the results on your desktop)
It has been years since I had to go in the xorg.conf file, that was the main reason I switched from debian to ubuntu. That is the only feature I wish of any Ubuntu release. Can someone tell me if it has now been implemented ? From the release notes, they don't seem to mention it.